Hi Shane, all
[re-sending without the attachment - didn't make it through to the
lists because of size]
On 11 oct. 07, at 11:18, Shane McCarron wrote:
> Independent of this issue.... it is certainly reasonable to have the
> validator use locally cached versions of things referenced by
> documents being validated.
Yes, I agree. For better or worse though, the sgml parser used by the
validator is using a catalogue solution and I suspect adding a caching
capability to it would be a little hard.
>> Are these DTDs changing so often that it would be a burden for the
>> XHTML WG to drop a mail to www-validator saying "the DTD for foo
>> has been updated, please update your catalogs"? Remember, readers
>> on this list include not just developers for the W3C's validator,
>> but pretty much all of them.
> It is surely not a burden. We manage a great number of DTDs, and
> many of those are under active development right now. I am not sure
> how often you can handle updates, nor when it would be appropriate
> to update something as public as the validator.
As a matter of fact, I think we will have a small update of the
validator soon: just a couple of bug fixes that are due - overdue -
for inclusion in the stable distribution. I was wondering if that
would be a good time to update the sgml-lib used by and distributed
with the markup validator to use the latest version of dtd and modules
de xhtml modularization, 1.1, basic and print? I attach a bulky diff
between the version of DTDs in http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/ and the
ones currently in the validator. Could we work together on this update?
>> That said, if a DTD is changing a lot for a period of time, we
>> could remove it temporarily, upon your request, from the
>> validator's catalog, but that should not be systematic.
> I would be happy to work with you on developing a process that makes
> sense for all groups; surely this cannot be unique to XHTML.
I think XHTML is pretty much the only technology still changing/
developing its DTDs. But indeed, a process to handle the evolution of
schemas and their inclusion in our tools would be extremely useful for
now and for the future. Our current process,rather crude, implies that
a spec goes to CR, PR, REC and then stays there - not the reality any
more. The process was also made for a time when validation was
provided after technologies went to REC, which we now want to change
to allow validation since the early days - for early adoption.
The way I have found to handle this is to add "awareness" of the
document types early on, but only add the schemas to catalogue at a
later stage, when they become stable. This, however, has not worked
well with XHTML mod and friends since these have been re-worked on
since REC.
Any help making the process more agile - maybe, as I wrote earlier,
simply removing files from the catalogue when they go from stable to
"under work" status - would be welcome.
--
olivier